Better luck next year: Chicago Blackhawks have the most important piece, but need almost everything else
The Chicago Blackhawks are the first team to be eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention. Let's talk about them.
Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We start today with the first team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Chicago Blackhawks.
When it comes to “what went wrong” for the 2023-24 Chicago Blackhawks the answer is actually very simple.
They just stink.
They were expected to stink.
But it is not the type of stink that comes from mismanagement or bad moves (that already happened long ago), it is simply the result of a full-scale rebuild that began over a year ago by completely tearing down the last remnants of their 2010s Stanley Cup teams.
It was probably overdue, because the tail end of the Stan Bowman era was a broken down clown car overflowing with bad roster management, bad trades, bad salary cap management and a team that was awful despite the general manager actually trying to win.
That is the bad kind of stink.
(This is probably a scorching hot take for another day but there is not a more overrated figure in recent NHL history than Bowman. He fell ass backwards into a ready-made contender where Mike Smith and Dale Tallon did almost all of the heavy lifting and just had to fill in some spare parts around the edges. And then when he actually had to rebuild the team he fumbled the bag in a laughable way. And that is just the hockey aspect of his tenure and doesn’t even get into mishandling of Kyle Beach. In short — don’t give Stan Bowman another chance.)
The teardown that started a year ago was designed to help land a franchise-changing player at the top of the NHL Draft, and thanks to some lottery ball luck they ended up getting that with No. 1 overall pick Connor Bedard. He is now the new face of the franchise and the most important piece of their rebuild.
Getting a player like him is everything for a team trying to chart out a new path.
Unless you have a home grown superstar, your rebuild probably isn’t going to pan out. Just about every Stanley Cup winning team has a No. 1 or 2 pick somewhere on their roster, and it is almost always a player that they themselves drafted. There are some exceptions to that, of course, but they are exactly that — exceptions. It takes some good timing and good luck to land that player, but the Blackhawks got it with Bedard.
That is the most important part.
Now comes the hard part — trying to rebuild an entire team around him.
That is where teams typically go wrong, and the Blackhawks are still years away from getting there and seeing how this process all plays out.
So let’s dig into what this season has looked like, what went wrong, what went right and where they go from here.
Everything that went wrong
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